Act on Climate is a team of citizens who are concerned about climate change and want to take action on it at a grassroots level.

We are a diverse bunch from all walks of life; from the inner city to rural areas, young and old, and from many professions, who see the impacts of climate change in our lives already in different ways.

The main objective of the new campaign was to start building a climate policy agenda for Victoria. With a five-year campaign cycle coming to a close, it was essential to put new ideas on the table and start building community power for another round of climate action.

Energy policy has been a hot topic in 2017. But with misinformation out there in the community, it's time to get informed and set the record straight.

Victoria has seen French company Engie closed the state’s largest coal power plant, Hazelwood, in March 2017 after operating ten years longer than its technical life.

We've also seen the Andrews government legislate Victorian Renewable Energy Targets (VRET) with support from The Greens, and crossbenchers Suzanna Sheed, Fiona Patten, and James Purcell. This initiative will rollout up to 5,400 MW of solar and wind farms across the state by 2025.

Unfortunately, some politicians are using this period of change for point scoring. And it'll take leadership from the community to get the facts out there.

Friends of the Earth: Coalition of the willing on renewables welcome, but “must deliver existing state/territory commitments”Friends of the Earth, the environment group that coordinated the campaign for a Victorian Renewable Energy Target, welcomes the idea of a joint state and territory effort to rollout renewables as long as it delivers existing commitments: “A coalition of willing states and territories to drive the rollout renewable energy is a good idea, as long as it delivers existing commitments such as the Andrews government’s Victorian Renewable Energy Target,” said Pat Simons, Friends of the Earth's renewable energy spokesperson.“Australians overwhelmingly support more renewable energy and would welcome a joint effort among states and territories that is a race to the top.”

The Point Henry aluminium smelter was located near Geelong and operated for many decades prior to its closure in 2014.

Since then, both Alcoa (who operated the smelter) and the state government have been considering what to do with the site. It is a sprawling and heavily contaminated industrial site, situated on land of cultural significance, plus conservation areas and other industries.

Friends of the Earth believes that the old smelter site would make an ideal location for a renewable energy park. The smelter used a lot of electricity, which was transmitted by a high voltage connection to the grid, which could be utilised if power was generated on site. A wind and solar energy park could be combined with a range of other uses including eco tourism.

Infrastructure Australia has announced that it wants state governments to hand the operation of their public transport systems over to private operators, arguing that they could cut costs and improve service quality by doing so.

Friends of the Earth Australia (FoEA) strongly opposes any move to further privatise public transport systems:

“Infrastructure Australia was designed to be an independent statutory body so as to be able to provide the best possible recommendations to government” said FoEA campaigner Cam Walker. “But further privatisation sounds more like an extension of failed neo-liberal politics and less like sound public policy”.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is an unproven, risky and expensive technology. State and federal governments have put huge amounts of public funds into CCS research for years, in the hope it will provide the solution to the greenhouse pollution generated by coal fired power stations.

Here in Victoria, where we have three remaining coal fired power stations, some are hoping these plants can be retrofitted to use CCS technology.

There are also a number of companies pursuing ‘new coal’ initiatives which will be reliant on CCS to be viable. Most notable of these is probably the Kawasaki Heavy Industry ‘coal to hydrogen’ project planned for the Latrobe Valley

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, it would appear that we are still not close to even knowing if or when CCS might be commercially viable at any kind of scale. It is also not clear whether CCS will be able to safely contain greenhouse emissions from coal power stations for an indefinite period of time.

ESSO has officially opened its new gas conditioning plant at Longford in Gippsland, promoting it as the largest domestic gas project on Australia's eastern seaboard, and one that will give certainty to the state's gas supplies for about 40 years.

The development will supply 1.6 trillion cubic feet of gas to eastern Australia, which Esso says is enough to power a city of one million people for 35 years.

The conditioning plant represents the completion of the $5.5 billion Kipper Tuna Turrum project in Bass Strait, which has resulted in the development of two new gas fields and the upgrade of a third. The plant will remove excess carbon dioxide and mercury from the gas taken from the offshore gas fields, which will then be processed at Longford.